Russian icebreakers Krasin and the Admiral Makarov, engaged in the Okhotsk Sea rescuing the ice-trapped factory ship Sodruzhestvo, have now cleared the most difficult stretch of ice, covering eight nautical miles over the past 36 hours.
We are told that the ships still have 25 miles before they reach open sea but, from all accounts, the worst is over. We are nonetheless reminded that the Sodruzhestvo (pictured) has been the hardest of the trapped ship to tow due to its wide body. The icebreakers have to coordinate their efforts to clear a wide channel in thick ice for the vessel to finally reach open waters.
TASS is reporting that the success raises hopes that the month-long rescue operation could end in two more days. The convoy will soon reach the area of drifting ice. After that thirty miles will remain to clear water. "The voyage is likely to take another two days and the rescue operation may end on January 30," Far Eastern Shipping Company spokeswoman Tatyana Kulikova says.
COMMENT: OKHOTSK SEA CRISIS
We are thus spared its observations that, in betweenchopping up £4 billions-worth of brand new, unused aircraft, we have officials who descend into the absurd, fining a 64-year-old grandmother £50 even as she picked up a piece of litter she had accidentally dropped.
We need not worry about its puzzlement at the contrast, when the state broadcaster hires 20 dog-owners to get their pets to poo in a local street, to demonstrate to grateful license (aka tax) payers what it will be like if they don't pay even more tax. And we are spared the problem of having to explain why BBC Trust chairman Sir Michael Lyons has run up expenses totalling more than £12,000 in six months, the grateful license (aka tax) payers thus having to stump up for, amongst other things, £5,593 on hotels, £4,501 on train fares and £427 on flights.
There will also be no ET to discover that this is the country where stunned councillors have been told that there will be no police patrols after 8pm at newly-built adventure playground at Waterlees Park in Wisbech, Cambridgeshire, because it is considered "dark and dangerous".
Our putative ET will never learnt that the madness also spreads. It will not find out that European authorities are still unable to charge for a gas produced when people breathe out, and which is absorbed by plants as fertiliser, because thieves have stolen £25 millions-worth of the permits to produce it, and despite confident predictions, have not been able to fix the insecure computer systems.
And it will never know that French elephants who pack their trunks and go to the circus in North Africa have become Moroccan "nationals" and cannot return home because of bureaucratic rules - and nor will it find out that most "green bio-fuel" aren't. Perhaps it is just as well there is only one world. There probably isn't enough room in the universe for two of them. And the aliens have taken over anyway. We don't need an ET to phone home and tell everybody how mad we are.
COMMENT THREAD
The crying waste involved in scrapping the remaining Nimrod MR4s sees the end of a saga that began with a decision made by Portillo in his capacity as defence secretary for the Major government. How apt it is that the mistake, having been made by a Tory minister, should have to be corrected by ... a Tory minister. And how typical it is that the taxpayer foots the bill, currently up to £4.1 billion, for which we get nothing at all but an expensive pile of scrap.
It is not altogether a bad idea trying to graft on new technology onto old airframes, but this project carried the practice to extremes, ending up with virtually new (but not quite new) aircraft, at more than three times the cost (and possibly much more) of buying and converting new airframes. For once, I am with Lewis Page on this. We are better off without these white elephants.
The worst of it, though, is that we really do need this capacity, and none of the alternative options really cut it. Apart from anything else, if we have a serious maritime incident out in the near or mid-Atlantic – such as, say, a large ship sinking - we will need overhead assets for command and control.
But, while the clever dicks prattle, what this case underlines is the importance of procurement, the long shelf-life of bad decisions, and the costs of getting it wrong. Yet, at the time Portaloo made his decision, there was very little intelligent (or at all) discussion in the media. Everybody can be wise after the event. What we need, though, is to be wise before the event, in which case the worst of these disasters could most certainly be avoided.
Unfortunately, that would require of the media, amongst other things, to spend some time researching and understanding a subject, and writing intelligently about it. It is not that hard - look at FRES for instance - but this is not something in which our media has shown any great skill.
Thus, for all the weeping, wailing and gnashing of teeth, we are most certainly likely to see history repeat itself, with more procurement disasters probably already in the making - the Army has not yet abandoned its ambitions for FRES.
COMMENT THREAD
The Met Office is caught out in a lie. Why is it that lying is the dominant ethos of public service these days?
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